Drilon bucks creation of disaster dept
SEN. Franklin Drilon is not too keen on the proposal to create a Department of Disaster Management, saying it contradicts the move of some senators to streamline the bureaucracy.
President Rodrigo Duterte had earlier urged Congress to pass a law creating a disaster management department.
Drilon said there are Senate bills aimed at “rightsizing” the national government to speed up the delivery of public services.
Senators Loren Legarda and Vicente Sotto in November 2016 filed Senate Bill 1162 and 1167, respectively, seeking to streamline government operations to eliminate “excess” agencies and further improve public service delivery.
These bills have been consolidated into one.
“The premise of this bill is that we have a bloated bureaucracy. There is a need to rightsize the government,” Drilon said.
“This (Departmet of Disaster Management) is the third department that they are proposing aside from the Depart of Housing and Department of Culture,” he said.
“Is this consistent with the rightsizing bill? I don’t think so. What we can do is strengthen the Office of the Civil Defense rather than having a new department.”
“The general feeling is, if we push the rightsizing of the bureaucracy, the policy, then, is to reduce the size of the bureaucracy. This is not consistent with creating at least three departments. It will be a disaster,” Drilon added.
Sotto said that the Philippine bureaucracy comprising of 186 government agencies has over 1.5 million workers as of August 2016.
“These figures have tremendously increased over the years without properly managing its proper size in the workforce that led to duplications in functions and redundancy in the position,” he said.
Sotto noted that almost 30 percent of the yearly national budget goes to salaries and benefits of government employees.
He said SBN 1167 authorizes the President the “authority to abolish, create and transfer offices within the national government.”
“The concept of rightsizing, as coined in this measure, is in line with the battlecry of the Duterte administration to operate the national government with optional cost and efficient human resources,” he added.
Legarda agreed.
“Structural reviews conducted on the Philippine bureaucracy demonstrate that a major source of the government’s inefficiency is the ‘wanton’ creation of agencies, resulting in overlapping, redundancy, and sometimes unclear delineation in the functions of the government workforce,” she said.
Legarda’s SBN 1162 seeks to rightsize the organizational structures of the government, covering all national government agencies, including departments, bureaus, offices, commissions, boards, councils, and all other entities attached to or under their administrative supervision, to simplify systems and processes, and to attain expediency in frontline services.
Sotto’s SBN 1167 calls for the creation of a Committee on Rightsizing the National Government to be chaired by the Executive Secretary with the Secretary of Department of Budget and Management (DBM), Director General of the National Economic Development Authority (NEDA), Chairman of the Civil Service Commission (CSC), and head of the Presidential Management Staff (PMS) as members.
SBN 1167 provides that while there might be eventual changes in the organizational structure and staffing in the affected offices, affected personnel, whether hired on a permanent or contractual basis “shall be entitled to retirement benefits and separation incentives.” BERNADETTE E. TAMAYO
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